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In overseeing national forests for most of George W. Bush's presidency, Mark Rey has had a hand in controversial policies, faced worsening fire seasons and tussled with environmentalists, and was even threatened with jail by a federal judge.
But the outgoing Agriculture Department undersecretary shrugs off the clashes. "The person in this job is going to be a lightning rod for criticism irrespective of who that person is," Rey said in a recent interview.
Rey cites Bush's Healthy Forests Initiative, which aimed to remove dense brush and trees from wildfire-prone areas near residential areas, and the growth of conservation programs for private lands as his biggest accomplishments. But he acknowledged that the Obama administration is likely to try reversing some of his favorite policies.
"That's sort of the way democracy works," he said.
Rey has had many tussles with environmentalists, who saw him as the fox guarding the henhouse, but he notes that two of his predecessors were stripped of funding by Congress and one was fired by the Agriculture secretary.
"If you are going to occupy this seat, you better start with the premise that almost without regard to who you are, there's going to be conflict and controversy attached to decisions that you're going to have to make, because they're resource allocation decisions that are almost always closely contested," he said.
A U.S. District Court judge in Montana threatened to hold Rey in contempt and send him to jail after the Forest Service responded too slowly to court orders requiring an environmental study on the effects of a chemical fire retardant. But Rey downplayed the dispute, saying that threatening contempt is about the only way the judicial branch can compel action from the executive branch.
"I think people tend to dramatize that controversy, maybe to a greater degree than is justified," Rey said. "There's going to be tension between the branches of government. So that's not that uncommon; I think it sounds like a lot more conflict than it is."
Judge Donald Molloy wanted Rey to turn over materials the undersecretary claims he "didn't wholly control" since the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service decided to do a broader review of the flame retardant's environmental impacts. It took more time, Rey said, but it resulted in a more thorough analysis.
Asked what he would have done differently, Rey joked, "My biggest regret is that I served during a period of budget deficits and drought, because it would have been a lot easier otherwise."
Saying he took the undersecretary's job promising to keep an open door and an open mind, Rey said he has met "with just about everybody who wanted to come in the door, whether or not I believe that their cause was worthy of this office's attention." He also met people on the road, earning about 350,000 frequent-flier miles in 2007, he said.
Rey took a parting shot at environmental groups, saying they were not willing to hear him out.
"The biggest surprise that I've encountered in this job is the apparent lack of interest in dialogue from some groups," he said, noting that he had spoken before the boards of the Trust for Public Lands, the Nature Conservancy and Trout Unlimited. "But I have never scored an invitation to speak to any other gatherings of environmental groups."
Before joining government, Rey worked for paper and forest-product associations. But he disagrees with reporters and others who refer to him as "a former timber industry lobbyist."
"The groups that I've met with at their request -- whether they agree with me or not -- understand that the president selected me," he said. "So for them -- whether they're in the forest products industry or another industry or environmental groups -- the fact that 14 years ago I represented the forest products industry is largely irrelevant.
"I think reporters, on the other hand, always face a challenge to simplify complicated stories for their readers or their listeners or viewers. With a label, you can sort of create an image without really explaining the circumstances in a very detailed way."
The timber industry has changed greatly since he left it, Rey added, as most timber lands have been spun off into real estate trusts. "I'm not sure, if I went back to the industry in some form, what I'd find there," he said.
The changing business approach to the timber industry has pros and cons, he said. "The lands are there to generate certain margins of profit over time, and if the best way to generate that is selling the land, then they'll sell it," he said.
Subdividing and developing the most desirable property, Rey said, is "probably not so good unless you're the guy who gets your house in the woods as a consequence."
On the other hand, he said, timber companies are now considering other types of opportunities, including providing ecosystem services like carbon credits.
The Forest Service aims to maintain a "creative balance and constructive tension" among competing timber, conservation and recreation interests, Rey said. He dislikes proposals to move the service into the Interior Department, saying that would not solve any problems.
Asked about what people might remember about his work at USDA, Rey said, "I don't know that I have a big enough ego to think that I have a legacy." But he touted the Healthy Forests Initiative and the enactment of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act.
Rey said 1 million acres were treated per year in the 1990s for hazardous fuels reduction, while 4.5 million acres were treated last year and a total of 27 million acres have been treated since 2001. That means the service is about a third of the way to addressing the 80 million to 90 million critical acres.
"And as a consequence of that, we're seeing less economic and ecological destruction as these fire seasons continue," he said. "The fire seasons are still difficult, because we still do have areas that have high fuel loads; we are in an extended drought situation."
Fires in Southern California in 2007 were more severe than in 2003, but about 2,000 fewer structures were lost, despite the existence of nearly 200,000 new homes to protect. "We know in several of those 20 major fires that we had subdivisions saved because of fuels treatment work that was done in the ensuing years," he said. "So I think all of that is a significant achievement."
Healthy Forests' results, Rey said, show that the legislation's opponents overstated its potential problems. "Having now had five years of experience with the Healthy Forests Restoration Act ... the only thing more intense than the fires we were seeing is the rhetoric about what this was all going to do," he said. "If you remember back, the allegations were that this was going to be a mechanism for giving the timber industry access to old-growth forest and do all sorts of bad things, not a single of which has occurred."
He added, "That's one of the nice things about serving two terms: You can actually square the performance with what the original rhetoric was, as a way of maybe instructing future policymakers about how seriously to take some of the arguments that are going to be levied about future initiatives."
Rey also praised efforts made under the conservation titles of the two farm bills signed into law during his tenure, saying there are now more than 210 million acres of private farms, ranches and forests under conservation practices, including about 8 million acres protected in conservation easements.
In recent years, the Forest Service has had to raid other programs to fund firefighting, and Rey said the agency's budget needs to be revamped. Asked about lowered morale because of budget problems, Rey said service employees have been creative in overcoming the difficulty, and that in a time of war, other budget priorities will dominate.
Rey advocates keeping the predictable costs of fire preparedness on budget but creating a separate account for the biggest wildfires, whose costs vary from year to year.
The increasing number of houses built in areas near forests, or the "wildland-urban interface," will make future fire seasons more difficult and costly, he said. In the last two decades, 60 percent of the new home construction in the United States has been in that area, he noted.
"We've taken the equivalent of the current population of California and sprinkled them out in the woods in houses," he said. "The difference between what it costs you and what risks you take and how you fight a fire in an inhabited versus uninhabited area, it's very significant."
He said development near forests will have a much larger effect on worsening fire seasons than global climate change. There were "much worse" fire seasons at the turn of the last century, because of drought and the lack of today's firefighting force, he said.
"We've had bad seasons before," Rey said. "I don't think that part of it's linear, even with global climate change showing a gradual warming. So it'll have an effect, but I don't think it'll be nearly as big an effect as the growth of the wildland-urban interface."
As for whether people who build in that area should pay more for firefighting, Rey said they should not pay more taxes.
"Then the question would be, 'Well, OK, sure, I'll do that, but the people living in Manhattan should pay more for police protection than I should because nobody's going to bother me out here in the woods,'" he said. "So I don't think you get anywhere trying to approach the issue that way."
But insurance companies are starting to write policies that require fire-wise building practices, and local governments can use their zoning laws to require that construction be done in a fire-resistant way.
"I think disaster response, including firefighting, is an inherently governmental function," Rey said. "If you try to privatize it, I think the results probably aren't going to be as good. But you can, I think, use government to reduce risk."
The timber industry, environmental groups and the Bush administration have been battling in court during most of the Bush administration over the 2001 Clinton roadless rule, which granted blanket protection to about 58 million acres nationwide.
Asked how the controversy will ever be resolved, Rey said, "If the definition of resolution is that 100 percent of the people are going to be satisfied with the outcome, then it's never going to be resolved."
He added, "I have no doubt that the ultimate fate of the Clinton rule will be decided by the Supreme Court, because I don't think the partisans on either side will give in until that's over."
The roadless issue dates back 50 years to the 1964 Wilderness Act, and three administrations -- of Presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton -- have tried to put national roadless rules in place, Rey said. Those were all challenged in court and have not been successful, but neither have attempts to settle the issue on a forest-by-forest basis, he said.
The issue is so difficult because it requires detailed, site-specific information and requires a lot of cash. He cited a trip to North Dakota with Gov. John Hoeven (R) during which they drove through a "roadless" area on a graded road.
"If you try to do a national rule, you get all the political closure you want," Rey said. "You can get the president of the United States to stand on the side of a ridgetop in Virginia and say, 'This is the final decision.' What you can't get is a lot of certainty that you actually got the details right."
And a forest-by-forest approach does not work "because the person making the decision is a GS-14 or GS-15 career civil servant, and everybody today knows that you can a conflict higher up the food chain if you're determined to do so," he added.
That is why the Bush administration put in place a rule allowing states to petition for their own roadless protections, for a better mix of political closure and technical details, he said. "The state-specific rules ... are going to be the best results that we've achieved in the long history of this debate," Rey said.
Two states have undertaken the process so far: Idaho's rule was finalized last month, but the Bush administration chose not to finalize the Colorado rule before leaving office, knowing that environmentalists distrust the administration.
"The simple act of finalizing on our watch could potentially diminish the value of what we wanted to achieve, so with the governor's blessing, we agreed it would be his job to carry it across the finish line," Rey said.
Environmental groups sued the Bush administration on Friday over the Idaho rule. Rey predicted they would not prevail.
"The Idaho rule had a lot more support from a wider variety of groups than any other iteration of the roadless debate than we've seen so far," he said.
Rey has advice for his successor: Be inquisitive.
"There's no question too stupid to ask if you're uncertain where a policy will take you," he said.
Rey said his favorite question at staff meetings is, "Then what?"
"If they don't have a good answer," he said, "the recommendation is probably not ready to be acted on."
The Obama administration will find some Bush initiatives they like and carry on, and others that they will want to move in a different direction. But the administration's ability to do that will be entangled by laws and regulations, he said. "Their desire to reverse some things will probably take longer and be harder than they think, just as we found that out when we came on," he said.
Noting that he worked for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the 1990s, Rey said he knows what members of Congress want out of a hearing -- something his successor would be wise to understand.
"One of the things that you come to understand fairly quickly is that the members of Congress are generalists and executive branch people tend to be more specialists," he said. "So often the members are not asking the exact question that they want the answer to. And if you can sort of parse through what they're saying to get to what they really need, you can be a lot more helpful to them and be a lot more effective witness."
People who take a government job and show their bias are not going to last long, he said.
"They're either going to do something illegal or something stupid," Rey said. "Wherever you come from, one side of the spectrum or another, as you go into public service, there's a pretty sharp disconnect to be a public servant, or you won't last very long. It really doesn't matter if my successor is from the Sierra Club or an industry group; my successor will have to learn that to be effective."
As for what Rey will do next, he said, it will take at least a few weeks to decide.
"That's a very good question, and one that my wife keeps asking, with increasing urgency," he said. "And the short answer is I haven't figured it all out yet. I have eliminated some possibilities, I'm considering some others that I can lawfully consider at this point, and there's still others that I'm going to have to leave here before I can actually approach anybody and talk to them about it."
Click here to watch Mark Rey's Jan. 28, 2005, appearance on E&ETV's OnPoint.
Click here to watch Rey's May 17, 2005, appearance on OnPoint.
Senior reporter Dan Berman contributed.
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